Panspermia is the name for the theory that life exists and is distributed throughout the universe in the form of germs or spores. This short computer animation places the viewer in the middle of a virtual world of an aggressively reproducing inter-galactic life form, and depicts a single life cycle of this unusual self propagating system.
Original software was used to create and animate forests of 3D plant structures. "Artificial evolution" techniques were used to interactively select from random mutations of plant shapes until a variety of interesting structures emerged. The subject matter of the piece suggests the underlying biological methods that were used to efficiently create an unusual level of complexity. Dynamic simulations and particle systems were also employed to achieve motions that are calculated automatically.
Attempts were made to bring together several concepts: chaos, complexity, evolution, self propagating entities, and the nature of life itself.
Credits
Software and Animation by Karl Sims
Sound by David Atherton, David Grimes, Steve Blake, Target Productions
Thanks to Lew Tucker, Jim Salem, Carl Feynman, Dave Sheppard, David Marvit, JP Massar, Gary Oberbrunner and Danny Hillis
This piece was rendered on a Connection Machine CM-2 computer.
Contact Information
For further technical information see: "Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics" K.Sims, Computer Graphics (Siggraph '91 proceedings), July 1991, pp.319-328. and "Particle Animation and Rendering Using Data Parallel Computation" K.Sims, Computer Graphics (Siggraph '90 proceedings), Aug. 1990, pp.405-413. For information on other works by Karl Sims visit: http://www.genarts.com/karl/
Live Music
Archive
Librivox
Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Internet
Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American
Libraries
TV News
Understanding
9/11
